Online shopping is a form of e-commerce, which allows customers to purchase available products without having to go out of their homes to buy products of their choice. Online shopping also provides geographically distributed vendors to connect with their potential customers without having to be physically located near them. At present, a large number of online storefronts are available that are creating a global platform for online shopping. These online store fronts allow users to view a catalogue of products providing them with a wide variety of options to choose from. The transactions also are made through secure encrypted communication pipes, thus, making it secure and comfortable for the customers to shop. Such storefronts may also be provided by embedding the storefronts in a topical online community.
A topical online community may be a blog, a web forum, a social networking website, a video-sharing website, and the like. A topical online community facilitates interaction between one or more groups of people that may share their views towards a topic of common interest. It may be a local or a worldwide community, providing a platform for people from different geographical locations to interact. A topical online community generally contains a plurality of topical community web pages also known as a fan page, a group or channel that contain data related to a particular topic. A member or user of the topical online community may access such a fan page, group or channel and thereon may access data posted on the same. A popular example of a topical online community is Facebook, where friends, acquaintances and the like may interact, share pictures, videos, like fan pages, subscribe to groups of their interest and a lot like it. Another example of a topical online community is YouTube®, which provides a worldwide platform for people to share their videos wherein community members are free to watch or comment on the various videos posted by various people and may also subscribe to a channel related to a topic such as cricket, rock music, and the like. Yet another example is twitter, where the registered users can read, post short messages and comment on short messages.
An online storefront embedded in the topical community may allow the community members to select and pay for an online product of their choice, including providing information about the product features, specifications, appearance, pricing, availability and the like. The community members may also like the product, share the product information, comment regarding the product, and the like. Such an online storefront may provide product recommendations, however, it may happen that the displayed recommendations do not match a customer's requirement or there may be a deviation from that what exactly is needed by the customer. Product recommendations are generally based upon the description and specifications of a product or may also be based upon technical attributes of the product. Another way for recommending products is to provide at least one objective and a subjective measure about a product and then calculating a reputation level from the same measures, thus, displaying a list of products according to the calculated reputation level. It allows a customer to navigate through the highest ranked product towards the lowest one. The products with low reputation level might sometimes be removed from the storefront itself. But, the ratings are subjective in nature and might not represent the true quality of the product. Moreover, at present no mechanism exists that can dynamically and iteratively refine the product recommendations based on various factors such as a change in customer priorities, product availability, marketing campaigns in process for a particular product and the like.
Hence there remains a need for providing a better recommendation mechanism that provides a potential customer with more relevant product recommendations based on various factors that may have a higher probability of turning into a sale. Further, time constraints for a customer to conduct detailed research into various products available make things difficult for him and may reduce chances of a sale. Hence, there is also a need to provide a system and method for providing recommendations and refining such recommendations that enables mapping to the customer requirements in comparatively less time duration. Finally, there is a need for community owners to provide guidance or hints to this recommendation facility to ensure that product recommendations remain germane to the topic or topic sets found in the topical community web page at large. This prevents product recommendations from diverging from community member's interests and ensuring a better and more focused experience for the community members. This becomes extremely important as and when products are sourced from fairly disparate venues.